Pretty thin soup here. Basically, the argument comes down to grammar and spelling suggestions, and then a couple of other features like document templates. I would need stronger evidence to believe that Word's grammar suggestions have empirically affected the language people use—outside Word itself, possibly. It would be much more tenable to say that Word influences how people write Word documents, but they seem to be saying the languages of the world have been influenced in some marked way by it, which I haven't observed. Nor did I observe a lot of evidence in that article, as opposed to speculation.

There are two cases in Polish where inaccurate translations in Windows have changed the Polish language.

Font has been translated as "czcionka", which in Polish originally meant sort (a metal block for a single letter).

Cancel has been translated as "anuluj" (to revoke, abolish).

This happened at the time when computers have exploded in popularity in Poland, and the terms have been assimilated along with all other computer jargon. Later attempts to correct the translations ("krój pisma", "poniechaj") have failed due to sounding like a pedantic deviation from an already established terminology. So Polish message boxes have [OK] and [Abolish] buttons.

I remember that Word's German spell checker started quite early to only accept the spelling "E-Mail" as correct. This was at a time when emails were fairly new, and spellings like "eMail" were also common. (Though not "email", as nouns are capitalized in German.)

I'm pretty confident that Word played a significant role in "E-Mail" becoming the canonically accepted German spelling.

MSWord is the ultimate benchmark. It’s been around since the Pc revolution started.

Ironically it hasn’t gotten much better in those 30 years since I first started using it. The new features have broken core features, and performance has gone backwards.

It is the perfect example of feature creep and over engineering that ultimately worsens usability. If I had enough vintage pcs I would do a 40 year analysis to answer why it’s gotten so much worse.

Ive been using word since 1991. I recently started a new job, got a fancy HP laptop, and I swear word ran faster on my 386SX than it does on this i9. Turn on “all markup” after a few people have edited it, and there’s a 2 second delay between keystrokes.

I’m Dutch, and the ways autocorrect changes my language, and I guess the German language as well, is not so subtle. We have a rule that when something is one “thing” like a “biophysics group”, we make it one word (Biofysicagroep). But almost any form of autocorrect will split these words. I’m really tired of correcting it all the time and I guess many others with me.

Certainly when it comes to computer software causing language to change far outside the sphere of computing terms, TikTok takes the cake, with words like "unalive" joining the real-world lexicon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospe... is a fascinating read for those unfamiliar with Gen Z jargon.

But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 :

> Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing.

The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language.

A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived.

Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.

> Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen.

Forgot about WordStar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

I was in middle school in the late 1990’s. Microsoft Word and Encarta were popular with some students, but the teachers weren’t necessarily tech savvy. If you copied text from an encyclopedia entry in Encarta to Word, the text would change to red burgundy. Students would copy content in their papers and wouldn’t even bother to change the color. I remember seeing examples of good papers in the hallways with the red text, and couldn’t believe that teachers had no idea what had happened.